There’s been a lot of ink spilt lately on Rupert Murdoch’s suggestion thatÂ John HowardÂ should get going while the going’s good. But it’s not clear to me that Murdoch’s prognostications about the future should be given too much weight. Here he is in February 2003, for example:

Mr Murdoch said the price of oil would be the war’s main benefit on the world economy.

“The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That’s bigger than any tax cut in the any country.”

In his new book, Philip Tetlock says that the reason political forecasters do worse than “dart-throwing monkeys” is that they behave more like what Isaiah Berlin described as “hedgehogs”, when they should be acting like “foxes”. Could it be that the King of Fox is a hedgehog?